Content

This unit focuses on the emergence and development of literary modernisms, introducing students to a predominantly British-based modernist tradition as well as alternative cultural and regionally specific literary modernisms. The unit will consider literary modernisms in light of the text's relationship with the past; war; the everyday; and the demise of mimesis and the subsequent articulation of the autonomy of art. It also considers how literary modernisms reflect and critique their contexts of cultural production, and the role of the metropolis, mass culture, gender, sexuality, race, and class. The unit also considers features of late modernism and of interrelated postmodernism such as self-reflexivity, irony, parody, metafiction, and intertextuality. Writers studied include T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Michael Cunningham.